Digital badges show students' skills along with degree

September 11, 2012

Passport,
a new classroom app created by Purdue University, allows instructors and
advisers to give students digital badges to indicate mastery of skills. The
application uses Mozilla's Open Badge infrastructure and is available for use
by instructors at any institution. (Purdue University image)Download Photo

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Digital badges, icons that
represent academic achievements or skills smaller than a college degree, are an
increasingly popular way for universities to acknowledge the breadth of student
learning.

Now Purdue University has developed a pair of mobile apps
that make creating, awarding and displaying badges much easier. The apps,
available online, are called Passport and Passport Profile .
A video explaining how Passport
works is available on YouTube.

Kyle Bowen, director of informatics in Information
Technology at Purdue, says badges are an exciting new concept that is being
adopted across higher education.

"Badges become a way to recognize learning in all of
its forms," Bowen says. "Passport provides a platform for anyone who
wants to deliver learning credentials. From creation of the challenge to
creating the actual badge image itself, and then a way to display earned
badges, it's all built into the platform.

"Many instructors are moving to new models of
instruction, and Passport is a technology that supports many of those new
models."

"Students learn in many ways and in a variety of
settings while attending a university such as Purdue," McCartney says.
"In addition to formal lectures and homework, there is also time spent in
labs and doing field work; time spent in service projects or internships; and
experiences they glean from student organizations. The Passport app will give
interested faculty and advisers another way to recognize and validate those skills
for students."

Through their college careers, students gain knowledge and
skills that may not be well-represented in their college degrees. A student may
have learned practical skills such as knowing how to write HTML code, have
earned a prestigious scholarship or served as an officer in a student
organization.

Digital badges are becoming a popular way to acknowledge
professional skills, and Purdue University has released the Passport
application to allow instructors to create badges for their students. The
creator tool in Passport offers a variety of templates on which instructors or advisers
can base their own badges. (Purdue University image)Download Photo

Badges are currently in use or in development at
institutions such as MIT, Carnegie Mellon, the University of California-Davis
and Seton Hall. Organizations outside of higher education are issuing badges,
too, including NASA,
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, The U.S. departments of
Veterans Affairs and Education, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and
the movie studio Disney-Pixar.

Purdue's Passport platform integrates with the popular
Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure, including
Mozilla Backpack. This
system, developed by the same organization that develops the Firefox Web
browser, allows the digital badge to include metadata such as who issued the
badge, how it was earned and when it was earned; users display their badges
through the Backpack site.

Mark Surman, executive director of Mozilla, says badges
empower learners to take charge of their online identities and reputations.

"We believe digital badges are the next step in
unlocking the full educational potential of the Web," Surman says.
"As a nonprofit organization committed to the power of open collaboration
and learning, we're extremely excited to see Purdue take this step. It's a
milestone for the entire OpenBadges project."

Bill Watson,
an assistant professor in Purdue's Department of Curriculum and Instruction, was instrumental in creating
the Passport platform and will be using Passport in a graduate-level course
this semester. He says the advantage of badges is that they allow faculty to
focus on competencies, skills and learner performance.

"Typically in courses, we have a number of very broad
learning goals, and grades are given out on student assignments tied to these
broad goals," Watson says. "But really, it is more a comparison of
students rather than a focus on student learning and attainment of desired
learning outcomes.

"Badges help instructors encourage students to
demonstrate how they have met very specific learning objectives through actual
performance."

Purdue's Passport platform consists of two apps: The
Passport app allows instructors to set the steps, or challenges, a student must
achieve to earn the badge. The app also allows an instructor or adviser to create a badge by choosing
from several templates.

The second part of the platform is Passport Profile. This
is an app designed for tablets that allows users to display their badges, both
Passport badges as well as badges from theirMozilla Backpack.

"We've created it so that you can easily show the
badges and the information behind them while holding the tablet and showing it
to someone," Bowen says. "That way you don't have to keep taking the
tablet away to navigate through the app. You can show the work behind the badge
as you speak."

Bowen says the Passport Profile app is operated a bit like
a guitar. A user holds his or her tablet with the screen facing the interviewer
and operates tabs along the bottom of the screen as if they were frets on a
guitar neck. Then the user "strums," or flicks, through screens and
images to display his or her portfolio.

"It's designed to work with large gestures so that
you don't have to have a good view of it yourself to show off your
portfolio," Bowen says. "You don't have to click on small buttons
with your fingertip. You just make these large gestures that let you move
through your presentation."

A new iPad app created by Purdue University allows users
to display professional digital badges. The app is part of Purdue's
Passport platform, and can display badges from the Passport app or from
the popular Mozilla Backpack. (Purdue University image)Download Photo

In addition to displaying Passport badges, the latest
version of Passport Profile, which has been submitted to the Apple iTunes App
Store, can also display any Mozilla Open Badge.

Each badge also has a URL that users can share on social
media sites. "As we get more users we'll build in a share function,"
Bowen says.

A sample badge is available at http://www.openpassport.org.
At the site users can create a Passport account or login using their Facebook
or Google+ credentials.

Among the first uses of badges at Purdue will be for
students who have successfully completed courses through nanoHUB-U, a
collection of short courses in nanotechnology offered online to an
international audience.

The courses focus on technical subjects in science and
engineering; upcoming courses for this fall include "Fundamentals of
Atomic Force Microscopy" and "Nanoscale Transistors." Students
who successfully complete the courses based on scores from five weekly exams
and the scientific simulation and virtual experimentation homework assignments will
receive a badge. Students who successfully completed previous Purdue nanoHUB-U
courses in "Fundamentals of Nanoelectronics" have already been given
the opportunity to receive Passport badges.

In the Spring of 2013 nanoHUB-U
will offer badges for the classes "From Atoms to Materials: Predictive
Theory and Simulations" and "Thermal Energy at the Nanoscale."

Purdue is looking for instructors or institutions that
would like to try the beta version of Passport as part of its test pilot
program.

"We're looking for up to 200 instructors and up to
10,000 students outside of Purdue to test the app," Bowen says.
"There's no charge for instructors to use the app, but we would like
feedback on how it was used in the classroom and suggestions on how to improve
the application."